Code of the Woosters

For some light vacation reading during my trip to Aruba, I finally took my the recommendation of my colleague Abid to check out P.G. Wodehouse. I went to the Strand UWS bookshop and picked out a book at random and Code of the Woosters was it.

I was familiar with the Jeeves & Wooster characters by Fry & Laurie televised presentation through my general awareness of global humor, but I didn’t know that Wodehouse was the originator of these trope characters.

While I don’t generally go in for the “Tee-hee, rich English people of yore and their manners lead to tittering towers of comedic repression” kind of media, this particular execution was neither too exhausting nor too self-referentially precious and chummy. That said, those qualities are certainly present, but they didn’t quite overstay their welcome.

The upshot is that an imbroglio unfolds that hinges on an ugly piece of silver (a cow-shaped creamer), a book of insults, a would-be fascist dictator, a retired judge, young people in love, our narrator-aristocrat Bertram Wooster, and his quick-thinking and duty-bound butler, Jeeves.

Undoubtedly what makes the tropes of rich “toffs” (I just threw up in my mouth a little writing that) in hijinx tolerable in the hands of Wodehouse is his joyful and ebullient use of the English language in zany comedic situations.

 ‘Oh, it’s a silver whatnot, is it?’
 ‘Yes. A sort of cream jug. Go there and ask them to show it to you, and then they do, register scorn.’
 ‘The idea being what?’
 ‘To sap their confidence, of course, chump. To sow doubts and misgivings in their mind and make them clip the price a bit.’

Upon seeing the cow-creamer:

  It was a silver cow. But when I say ‘cow,’ don’t go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out the side of its mouth for twopence…The sight of it seemed to take me into a different and dreadful world.
  It was, consequently, an easy task for me to carry out the [sneering] programme indicated by Aunt Dahlia. I curled the lip and clicked the tongue, all in one movement…

And elsewhere:

He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled, so I tactfully changed the subject.

In other parts insults:

“[On learning Mr. Fink-Nottle is to be wed] Spink-Bottle, eh? Bless his heart! How was the old newt-fancier?”

Now, I was quite under the impression that this was some sort of aristocratic slur, like being called a chowder-head or something like it. But no, we find out later that Fink-Nottle is indeed a fancier of amphibious animals: newts.

All together, I rather enjoyed the book and definitely laughed out loud at the hijinx and the language use. It was fun to gaze into this time shortly after the Great War where functionaries and landed gentry in His Majesty’s empire were figures of pleasure and benign noblesse when the expectations of these fluff-heads were to marry well, mind their dynastic lands, and carve up India and the Mideast lazily at the club over brandy and cigars before adjourning to a snooker game.

I rather enjoyed it an plan on considering more Jeeves & Wooster and have been recommended the PSmith series as well. When consulting with my friend, and the original recommender, he said the following paragraph rang true for him:

Perhaps the most common approach to reading Wodehouse is to start with whichever book you happen to chance across and be perfectly content to devour the rest of them in whatever order you seize upon them. Many people have read Wodehouse this way, especially those of us who collected our books second-hand in the days before internet booksellers and modern reprintings of his work.

So let neither order nor ceremony block you from entering this silly, sweet world.

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